Baleen Morning
by DearMyDreamer
Summary: He first meets her when she's singing in a library (and later he'll think, because of course she was).


He first meets her when she's singing in a library (and later he'll think, ___because of course she was_).

It's the middle of the night on a Sunday, and technically the university library is always open, but tonight no one else is there. Gwaine himself only stops by because his roommate has locked him out (again) and he's lost his keys (again) and the library isn't a bad place to sleep as long as you can hide away from the authoritarian night librarians. But then, ___then_, as he's trying to nap on a musty old armchair that he dragged into the back of the Tax Materials section, her voice floats down from an upper floor, soft and warm and gentle, making him think of blonde angels wearing little white night slips. That vision is more than enough to pull him out of the comfy chair and up the marble steps to search her out.

He finds her in Fantasy, filing books and singing wordlessly to whatever song is playing from her white earphones. She's no withering blonde angel. She's a goddess. Maybe a sly nymph or a murderous succubus on her off days. He can tell by her stature, shoulders back and feet planted firmly (despite her razor sharp heels that look like they've killed a man), and by the way her eyes sharply observe everything in front of her, making sure no book goes out of place. Her hair cascades down her back in loose black waves, a stark contrast to her bright, pale skin, and he thinks ___no. Not a goddess. Snow White's sister._ The forgotten younger sibling, left to fend for herself and became all the harder for it.

She turns around to pick up a few more books from her cart, and after a short glance in his direction, her song cuts off with a barely contained shriek. She rips the earphones out and nearly backs into the bookshelf. "What are you ___doing?!_"

Gwaine doesn't laugh, but only just. He crosses his arms and smiles at her. "Enjoying a free concert. Isn't there a rule about singing beautifully in the library?"

She either doesn't hear the beautiful part or doesn't care. She gives him a once-over and sneers. "Are you a bum?"

"What? No." He glances down at his worn blue shirt and frayed jeans and biker boots and thinks, well... "Not completely, anyway."

"Out," she says, crisp and clear while pointing a long, thin finger toward the door.

Gwaine only smirks and pulls out his wallet, his student I.d. card. "I go here. I'm an actual student. Which means, no. I think I'll stay a while."

"You can't sleep here."

"I think I can. Unless you want me to file a complaint every day for the next week about this 'singing librarian girl disturbing the peace.' Your terrifying boss lady is the one who reads the complaints, right?"

Her lips thin irritably and he's vaguely worried that she might start throwing books at him. "Fine. Just go away, then."

Gwaine laughs and raises his hands in defeat. "Yes, ma'am."

She peers skeptically at him as he backs away and leaves, but when he finally settles back down into his hidden armchair downstairs, her voice starts up again, quiet and echoing, lulling him to sleep.

"Wake up, bum."

Gwaine grunts and opens his eyes. She's towering above him, hair pulled back into a messy bun, eyes tired and irritable as they squint down at his disheveled form. There's a bit of sun pouring in from the higher windows now, and the sound of people milling about echoes off the walls. Gwaine groans as he sits up.

His human alarm clock is unimpressed, her lips downturning and her face generally giving off the aura of i'd rather be anywhere but here. And yet still, she says, "My boss is here, and she'll find you if you hang around. She doesn't tolerate the homeless."

"Not a bum," Gwaine mumbles. He stands and stretches, purposely raising his arms high enough to pull his shirt up over his well-toned abs.

She starts to play with her phone.

He sighs. "You need coffee."

"I need sleep," she mutters, still tapping on her phone as she starts to walk away.

"Coffee and fresh scones and then sleep," Gwaine counters, trotting happily beside her. "I'll pay."

She looks up from her phone and gives him a flat stare. Then sighs. "Fine."

Gwaine smiles wide and opens the glass front door for her. She doesn't say thank you, but she does smile a little in return. They walk out into the bright morning side by side, squinting their eyes against the sun and brushing shoulders as students and professors rush by them on the sidewalk.

"And who am I escorting to breakfast?"

"Morgana."

"Morgana. Morgan? Ana? Morry?"

"Just Morgana."

"Well, Just-Morgana, I'm Gwaine, but you will probably at some point call me 'idiot, insane, are-you-crazy, that-doesn't-go-there, and bail-money-doesn't-grow-on-trees.'"

She nods seriously. "I'm sure I will."

"We can place bets if you want. I win every time."

"Betting for or against?"

"For. If I'm really trying, I can get them all in one day."

She smiles, and though it's incredulous and confused, the look is good on her.

People never know how to react to Gwaine because he's honest about his faults. He lays them out fondly for everyone to see, and he's proud of who is no matter what. People are used to being shown humility and shame. Gwaine has never known the definition of either word.

The campus coffee shop (the only one that isn't a Starbucks and therefore the only one worth going to) is a small hole-in-the-wall kind of place nestled between campus and the strip. The coffee is always rich and the scones always fresh, and if Gwaine happened to be a little more hipster and a little less vagrant, he would live there in a heartbeat. He visits the place often enough as it is just for a hangover cure coffee. And, well, because his roommate works the front counter.

"Percy!" Gwaine bypasses the line of murderous morning students and heads straight for the end of the counter, Morgana trailing hesitantly behind him.

Percy, a mountain of a man with bulging biceps and a head shinier than a cue ball, smirks as Gwaine saunters up. He pulls out a set of keys from under the register and tosses them into Gwaine's hands. "You forget something yesterday?"

"Where were they this time?"

"Berta – that, you know, hefty lady who runs the beer pub? - found them in her cleavage this morning."

Gwaine frowns and his heart quickens. ___Berta? The lady with two of her front teeth missing? _No. He wasn't that drunk last night... Was he?

"I don't remember that."

Percy laughs and pours a cup of coffee to-go, hands it to a customer, and takes their cash. "Neither does she. I think it was Mordred trying to fuck with you."

"I hate that kid."

"No, you don't. You hate that you can't get him back."

"Nobody knows where he lives. Nobody has a class with him. He isn't real, Perce. He's a ghost."

"I have class with him," Morgana says. She's tapping on her phone again. "And he's a sweetheart."

"Take that back or you're not getting coffee."

She smirks. "I can tell you where he lives."

Gwaine turns back to the counter. "Percy, I need a cup of your best coffee and one of those white chocolate scones."

Percy ignores him, instead pouring a chai latte for another customer. "And you'll be paying with whose money?"

Gwaine juts his chest out proudly. "Mine. I sold a piece last night."

Morgana's eyebrows raise skeptically. "You're a drug dealer, too?"

Gwaine's ego twitches. "An artist. I sold a piece of ___art. _"

Her eyebrows raise higher. "And what do you paint with? Your dick?"

Percy snorts.

Gwaine winks. "Would you like to find out?"

Morgana shakes her head and smiles. She turns to Percy. "I'll have the coffee and the scone, please. If he can't pay for it, I will."

They leave fifteen minutes later, after Percy makes them go to the back of the line because___sorry, you seem like a nice girl but if you give Gwaine an inch, he'll take a mile, and I've just got him trained_. Morgana doesn't seem to take it personally. When Gwaine holds open the door for her on the way out and asks if he can walk her home, she even says yes.

"So why are you a librarian?" He asks, giving the library building a suspicious look as they pass it by again. He likes the place for sleeping, but he's never imagined wanting to work there.

"People always feel the need to ask that," she says wryly. "Technically I'm not a librarian yet. I'm just an intern. But I like helping people research, and I like learning new things. "

"New things like what?"

She taps one french-manicured finger against her coffee cup while she thinks. "Like...a boy came in last week working on a zoology project, and I had to help him find information on Baleen Whales. They're a kind of whale that have bristles called baleen instead of teeth, and that's what they use to catch their food as they swim. I didn't know that before. Did you?"

"No idea," Gwaine admits. "Sounds like me when I let my beard grow out."

She laughs softly, shoulders shaking as she tries to reign it in. Gwaine feels like he's won something.

"Admit it," he says. "You like me a little."

"I think you're ridiculous," she says frankly, but she's smiling. "And I have to go now. This is me."

Gwaine looks up and finds that they've wandered into Sorority Row, a street lined with pastel-colored houses that have greek letters on every mailbox. He inwardly groans. "Of course you're one of them."

Her smile turns conniving. "Afraid of sorority girls?"

"Afraid that they'll get their claws into me and make me get a real job and suck all life out of me until I'm left with a messy divorce and eighteen years of child support? Yes."

"Oh, honey. You don't have to worry. " She frowns mockingly and taps him on the cheek. "They wouldn't give you the time of day to begin with."

She turns and walks away, leaving Gwaine laughing on the sidewalk.

___Yes, _he thinks later, turning over that morning in his mind while making the walk back to campus, ___she's worth it._

- – - – -

Percy is dumbfounded when Gwaine starts stumbling home from the bar at a decent hour and waking up at the crack of dawn. He's even more dumbfounded when Gwaine continuously follows him to work every morning, ordering a coffee and a scone before anyone even bothers to show up, and then leaves to go appease a girl who doesn't even like him. Except she does like him. As a friend, maybe, but Gwaine will take what he can get. She's beautiful and she's a spitfire, and he likes hanging out with her. He'd be lying if he said he doesn't want to sleep with her as well, but despite what everyone seems to think, Gwaine knows that romance doesn't come from the dick.

Sometimes romance comes from coffee and scones and laughs after a long night at work. Occasionally it comes from carrying a girl's heels for her when she can't stand to walk in them anymore and then carrying the girl herself when she can't stand to walk at all. And then sometimes, like one day, a few months after he meets her, it comes from convincing her to play in the rain.

He's only brought a coffee for her this time (she's trying to lay off the scones and watch her weight) , and he meets her under the front alcove of the library, his hair and clothes dripping wet. She takes the coffee from him gingerly and shakes her head.

"Do you not own an umbrella?"

"Takes the fun out of a rainy day, don't you think?"

He expects her to snark back at him, tell him off for just being lazy or something similar, but instead she looks wistfully out at the rain and nods.

"My brother and I used to run out in the back yard when we were kids. We'd splash in puddles and throw mud at each other and play with worms. We drove our nannies crazy."

Gwaine bumps her shoulder with his. "You don't do that any more?"

She smiles wryly. "Who has the time? Or the clothes?"

"Well, as of right now, we do." He grabs her coffee and chucks it in the bin.

"Hey! What are you - "

He takes her hand and pulls her to the edge of the alcove, where the gutters dump water in a steady stream. She's soaked in seconds. "___Gwaine! _"

"Oh, look, you're already wet," he says, grinning cheekily even as she looks like she'll murder him. "No going back now. Come on, heels off."

She slips off her heels in jerky, irritated movements, then lets Gwaine grab her hand again. He leads her down the sidewalk, up between the buildings, and then to the small field that stretches between the back of the library and the social sciences building. On a sunny day, students can be found lounging around on the grass in varying degrees of sleep, but on days of torrential rain, they avoid it like the plague.

"No," she says, but there's no force behind it.

Gwaine nods and shrugs off his leather jacket, tossing it to the sidewalk. She lets him take her heels and set them down on top. "Yes."

She looks unsure and maybe even a little scared and lost. She's probably afraid that they'll get in trouble. But Gwaine will never let her get caught. He takes her hands in his and pulls her out onto the field. She squeals at the feeling of mud against her bare feet and laughs.

___Yes _, he thinks. ___More of that._

He lets go and starts to run, turning back to her halfway across the field to yell, "Come on, princess!"

She hates when he calls her that.

She chases after him at a full sprint, and he starts throwing mud at her legs. She throws it at his face. He misses. She doesn't. She's laughing loudly and openly, and he almost feels embarrassed, like he's witnessing something private. Morgana always laughs with confinement and poise. He's never seen her laugh like this.

When she catches him and tackles him to the ground, he thinks he loves her. She straddles him and puts mud in his hair, laughing so hard that her whole body shakes. Her hair is in crimped, wet waves and there's mud on her cheek and her prissy librarian clothes are all wrinkled and dirty and loose.

And she's the one who leans close and says, "If I kiss you with mud on your mouth, will you judge me?"

He wipes the mud off her cheek and smiles.

"I wouldn't dream of it."

He spends the rest of his day in a pastel pink sorority house, smelling like rosemary sage shampoo and lounging in a bed that has a furry purple comforter, and it's honestly the best day of his life.

- – - – -

They change but they don't change.

They're still friends and Gwaine still thinks she's the best thing since sliced bread, but he's allowed to touch her now and he's allowed to follow her into her home, into her bedroom. The things he starts to learn about her in the wake of his new allowances only make him like her more, and he's really starting to scare himself with how much he's grown attatched to this girl. He tells himself that it's just a phase, just a spark. She's just a friend who happens to be hot. She never tells him that she loves him and she never tells him that she wants to date, so he's assuming that she's thinking the same.

So he watches her and he touches her, but he never goes too far or gets too close.

He learns things.

For instance, he learns that she hates most of her sorority sisters. There's always a power struggle between them and Morgana always loses. The other girls don't like her bossy attitude. Gwaine is finding that he has a kink for it.

He learns that she only sleeps four hours a day, and the time she spends with him is time cutting into her sleeping schedule, so if he's going to fuck her, he'd better fuck her fast.

He's okay with this.

Finally, he learns that she never plays by the rules.

She wears underwear around the house with the curtains wide open and bakes cookies without flour (___why not flour?_ He asks her once. ___Because they don't __****__**need**____ it_, she answers crisply) and sometimes he wants to tell her that she's changing all the wrong things, but then he thinks of what would happen if Morgana should ever be unleashed upon the world, and he thinks yes, the cookies are bad enough.

It's a boiling hot day in May, after finals are over and she finally has time for things other than sorority business, that he brings her around to his place and she gets to learn about him for once.

"Statues," she says, looking around his apartment with a kind of morbid awe.

He gets that reaction a lot.

It might have to do with the life size mermaid making a duckface into a cell phone or the drunk troll butt chugging a box of wine or the little lesbian fairies having sex in furry club clothing. Honestly, it isn't his fault that his teachers give assignments that can be taken so liberally.

Morgana pokes the mermaid and blinks. "People still make ___statues. _"

Gwaine tries, really tries, not to take offense. "There's a statue in front of the library, you know."

She moves to the deer that has a rifle on its back and a cigarette in its mouth, and she pokes that one, too. "But it's one of those weird wirey things from a pop art museum. These are honest-to-god ___statues _."

He can't believe it for a moment, but she actually sounds impressed.

He clears his throat. "The ones in here are mostly school stuff. Except the troll. That was just for fun."

Morgana takes another look around and shakes her head. "I can't decide if they're cute or creepy."

Gwaine sighs, resigned, and fiddles with the fairies. "Yeah. I get that a lot."

"Are there statues in your bedroom?"

He looks up and she's smirking at him, pulling her shirt over her head no matter what his answer.

He smiles and winks. "Not if you don't want there to be."

The last thing he learns if that she kind of has a fetish for statues watching her having sex.

When he teases her about it, she throws a pillow in his face.

- - – - – –

They start to act less like friends and more like a couple as the summer goes on, and Gwaine can't pinpoint exactly when it happens, but he likes it. They take each other out on dates. He takes her to a small bar in the old part of the city where all they serve is scotch and whiskey, and he orders a single pour of every scotch until she finds one that she likes (Glenmorangie 18). She drags him to a woman's health convention and has him try on a pregnant belly and do the contraction simulator. He cries. She's unsympathetic. He takes her to a music festival and she takes him to an international festival. They both end up in the gay pride parade, and they're really confused about how that happened, but they get free rainbow jello shots, so that's something. He takes her out for icecream nearly every wednesday after work, and she complains that he's trying to make her fat, but she still goes and still orders a different flavor every time. He tries not to smile too smugly when she does.

"You should meet my brother Arthur," Morgana says one day, a paper cup of vanilla ice cream in one hand while she swirls a plastic spoon in the other.

Gwaine shrugs. "Frat-boy Arthur? I've met him."

She startles as she's taking a bite, and a bit of cream ends up on her nose. "What?"

"I out-drink those frat douches every Saturday on the strip. You know, It's truly amazing how much free liquor you can get with the words, 'I bet you can't.'" He wiggles his eyebrows. She doesn't think it's funny.

"You're ___the bar guy? _"

"The bar guy?"

"The guy who drinks all the time and gets into fights and ___lands my brother in jail? _" She's glaring at him now and pointing the spoon at him threateningly. It's hard to take her seriously when there's icecream on her nose.

Gwaine shakes his head. "He did that all on his own. I only helped him get less bruises."

"That's not what I heard."

"Then you heard wrong."

She turns away in a huff and makes to march off, but Gwaine touches her arm. "Wait, hold on."

She stops and looks back, ready to fight. He wipes the icecream from her nose.

"There. Now you can be angry."

She pouts in the irritated, dangerous-looking way that she always does. Then she takes a bite of icecream. And grabs his hand.

"I'm never bailing you out of jail," she says.

Gwaine squeezes her hand and smiles. "I'd never ask you to."

"Because you'd be in worse trouble with me, or because I'd rather leave you there until you learned your lesson?"

"Both."

- - – -

Things come to a head after school starts up again, after Gwaine and Morgana start hanging out with her brother and his boyfriend, and it starts feeling like double dates, but nobody brings it up. They've gotten terribly domestic. Morgana's clothes are mostly at Gwaine's apartment. She has her own drawer. He has a bottle of shampoo at her sorority house and a bar of soap that literally has his name etched on top. She sets Percy up with one of her sorority sisters. Gwaine loans her brother money... and, well, that's what brings it all about, really. Sort of. Mostly.

What really brings it about is when Gwaine brings a naked statue of Morgana to Arthur's frat house, and he invites her to the unveiling.

Of course, he realizes belatedly that he should have told her first, but then again, if he told her she probably would never have let him go through with it. All he's told anyone is that he finished a new project and wants to show it off, so he's bringing it with him to Arthur's fraternity house while most of the boys are away for lunch. The audience ends up being only three: Arthur, his boyfriend Merlin, and Morgana. Which is all Gwaine really needs.

He sets the statue, still veiled, on the living room floor while the three of them take guesses as to what it is, then goes back to get a nail gun from his jeep. Their guesses have spawned to "Harpy, Medusa, and cracked-out rabbit," as he returns.

"So, Arthur," Gwaine starts casually, checking to see if the gun is loaded, "do you remember that bit of money you owe me?"

Arthur eyes the gun warily. "Yes..."

Gwaine nods. "I've got a proposition for you."

He reaches over and yanks the veil off, revealing Morgana in picturesque naked glory, right down to her curly black pubic hairs.

"Oh god." Arthur's eyes immediately deviate and he all but runs out of the room.

"Nice tits," Merlin says casually.

Morgana nods with an odd, painful expression on her face. "Thank you, Merlin."

"___ARTHUR, I'M GOING TO NAIL HER, PUN INTENDED, INTO YOUR LIVING ROOM FLOOR UNLESS YOU PAY ME BACK IN THE NEXT TWO MINUTES._ ...If that's alright with you." He looks up at her with his best pouty face, and he can see her heavy embarrassment lighting up her cheeks even as she smirks with the need to make her brother suffer.

She sighs and closes her eyes. "...yes, fine."

Merlin's eyebrows raise judgingly, but Gwaine isn't sure if that's a good or bad thing. He starts counting back from ten. Arthur rushes into the room on eight with a hand over his eyes and shucks the money into the air before leaving again. Gwaine laughs as he picks it up off the floor.

"That's the quickest anyone's paid me back in my life."

Merlin taps his fingers against his hips and frowns. "What did he even owe you that much for?"

Gwaine smiles wide and taps his nose. "You should ask him."

Merlin's eyes narrow and he stalks out of the room.

"My lady, if you please," Gwaine says, handing Morgana the nail gun so he can carry the statue. "And careful where you point it."

She closes one eye and aims it low. "So you mean I shouldn't point it at your ass?"

Gwaine laughs nervously as he hefts the statue up and starts to move. "With your aim? Please don't. It'll be my balls instead."

"I have half a mind after that stunt. What did Arthur owe you for?" She holds open the front door for him and follows him out to his jeep.

"Well," he says, panting a little. "Six months ago he called me up because he wanted to make this grand romantic gesture for Merlin, but he didn't have the money to do it. And being a romantic myself," he sets the statue down behind his car trunk and taps the its shoulder, "I decided to help him out. But as you may have noticed, there still isn't a ring on Merlin's finger."

"Oh. My God."

"I know. Your brother is a slow bastard."

A smirk creeps across Morgana's face. "But now Merlin's going to ask him about it, and he'll have to fess up."

Gwaine holds up his hands defensively. "I'm only here for the money."

Morgana shakes her head and steps forward to kiss him. Gwaine backs away.

"Not with a nail gun in your hand."

"I'm not going to shoot you."

"One kiss, then. Because I'm gracious."

Later, in the hospital bed with a bandage around his foot, he'll regret that statement. He's not sure if he's more angry at her or himself on the drive to the hospital, even less sure when the doctors are giving him tetanus shots in his arm. But then there's Morgana apologizing at his bedside with honest-to-god tears of shame in her eyes, and everything is forgotten except pulling her into the bed with him and making her laugh.

That night, when he calls his mother and tells her everything, she asks,

"___And are you two alright? You're not fighting now, are you?_"

"Nah. I knew better than to give her a nail gun. She feels worse about it than I do, I think."

"___Hm._" A short, tinkling laugh echoes over the phone line.

"What?"

"___Sounds like love to me._"

"What do you guys think?" Gwaine asks Merlin, because somehow he and Arthur have become Gwaine's best friends in his newly domesticated life. "Does she love me?"

Merlin snorts into his beer. "You'd be dead if she didn't."

Gwaine frowns.

Arthur rolls his eyes. "If she didn't like you, and you pulled that stunt with the statue, she would've gone ballistic."

Merlin nods. "Her last boyfriend told her that her dress was too modest for a date night, and she kicked him in the boys so hard that he threw up all over the lawn."

Gwaine frowns harder. He can't think of a time he's ticked her off that much, though he thinks he came close when they first met. So either she's just really determined to put up with him or...

He smiles and takes a drag of his beer. "Thanks, guys."

Arthur pats him on the back. "Just don't get killed."

– - - - – -

Gwaine doesn't bring it up. He's happy just knowing about it, and he doesn't want to make her uncomfortable by saying it out loud. He waits. He waits through October when she gets too drunk on Halloween and he spends the night rubbing her back in the bathroom. He waits through November and her nursing him through the flu. He waits through December and driving through the night on Christmas to pick her and Arthur up from their father's house because he heard about Arthur's engagement to Merlin and didn't approve. He waits through January and escorting her to her friend Morgause's wedding, where he sees her cry for the first time from joy.

He waits until February.

It isn't Valentine's day. It's a random Sunday morning. He's made eggs and toast, and she made the coffee, and they're both tearing through their favorite sections of the morning paper while she sits on his lap like she belongs there. His legs are falling asleep, but he doesn't tell her that.

He finds an article that's interesting, and he tells her about it. Some kid he once knew got arrested for trying to rob a convenience store. She stops him mid-story by wiping a bit of egg off his beard. He laughs while she does it.

"My beard's like baleen," he says. He can't remember where he got the word from, but it makes her smile.

"I love you," she says, completely out of the blue and while she's still wiping food off his beard.

He kisses her, mumbles it back against her lips while she giggles.

When he asks her later, she says she didn't realize that she'd never said it before.

She can't remember when she started loving him.

She asks if it matters.

It doesn't.

- – - – -

It's a Thursday in the middle of the night.

Her warm dulcet tones echo across the empty library hall, sounding like an angel in a little white night slip. Gwaine sneaks up behind her and wraps his arms around her waist, resting his chin in the warm hallow of her shoulder. She takes out an earphone and hands him one, not pausing in her filing of books. Gwaine listens to the song for a few beats,

catches the tune,

and sings along.


End file.
